My stance on the benefits of the front lever (which isn't solid) comes from looking at an outcome (i.e. baseline climbing level and campusing ability) before and after a specific intervention (training the front lever), without any confounding activities that could have skewed my results (no chin-ups, climbing, or other training during that period). I come from the world of medicine, so these are the kind of analyses I'm used to.

Of course my little experiment would be considered a case study, and would easily be picked apart by a seasoned epidemiologist...

From what I understood from your previous posts, a kinesiological analysis is just that: an analysis used for hypothesis building. It means nothing until you test your hypothesis in at least a semi-scientific kind of way.

I don't know how you can be so dogmatic about your ideas.

Not at all, a correct kinesiological analysis is not some remote abstraction for hypothesis building, it can be used to build a hypothesis of course, but a correct kinesiological analysis will tell you exactly what bones, muscles and joints are involved in a movement and how they contribute to the movement in question.

Using video and other tools kinesiological analysis can be use to quantify the position of the center of gravity in space, as well as the duration and timing of a movement among other things.

With all of the thousands of moves possible in rock climbing, how can 2D video kinesiological analysis be exact-or even close for that matter

[Snip]

Again, I wonder how you can come to such conclusions and generalizations based on 2D video analysis.

4. Has anyone ever proven that indoor climbing is a "climbing specific exercise"? I don't see why we should blindly accept that contention any more than the contention that a front lever is climbing specific. In case you think I'm crazy, let me list a few reasons it's not:
- most gyms are less than 40' tall, these routes would all be considered "power" routes outdoors.
-every foothold in a gym is an edge, not so outside
-holds in a gym can be easily recognized by the climber before touching them.
-every hold in a gym is "comfortable"
-consider the time it takes to "on-sight" a route in a gym, vs. outdoors. The repetition lengths, rest periods and total duration of effort are very different from outdoor climbing.
-consider the number of moves on an outdoor route 80' long (100+?) compared to a 35' gym route (10-20?).
-In outdoor climbing you might "tic-tac" your feet 3-4 times between every hand movement, indoors, you frequently have a 1:1 ratio of foot to hand movements.

5. A wise man once told me (I'm paraphrazing here) that you shouldn't assume that top climbers know how they got to be top climbers. I'm sure many top climbers do all kinds of crazy things that might look like "training" to us, but that doesn't by any means prove its effectiveness.

There is another issue. Upper body strength that exceeds contact strength is almost useless. A person of moderate hand strength who can do one-arm pullups will never be able to apply that strength or anything close to it in the field, and is meanwhile lugging around muscle that consumes energy resources.

4. Has anyone ever proven that indoor climbing is a "climbing specific exercise"? I don't see why we should blindly accept that contention any more than the contention that a front lever is climbing specific. In case you think I'm crazy, let me list a few reasons it's not:
- most gyms are less than 40' tall, these routes would all be considered "power" routes outdoors.
-every foothold in a gym is an edge, not so outside
-holds in a gym can be easily recognized by the climber before touching them.
-every hold in a gym is "comfortable"
-consider the time it takes to "on-sight" a route in a gym, vs. outdoors. The repetition lengths, rest periods and total duration of effort are very different from outdoor climbing.
-consider the number of moves on an outdoor route 80' long (100+?) compared to a 35' gym route (10-20?).
-In outdoor climbing you might "tic-tac" your feet 3-4 times between every hand movement, indoors, you frequently have a 1:1 ratio of foot to hand movements.

Actually, just learning to climb indoors may be a strong negative when it comes to learning to climb outdoors. For an experienced outdoors climber, indoor climbing may be excellent training, but it can have a deleterious effect on a beginning climber who eventually wants to climb outdoors.

What is relevant is an individual climber's performance relative to his or her own genetic potential.

But what makes you so sure that anyone is even remotely close to this theoretical upper limit?

It seems quite possible, since this sport is so young, that we may all be so far from our "genetic potential" that such a limit (if it were measurable), would be completely irrelevant to how we should plan out our climbing training and climbing goals.

I've said it around here before, I think 99% of the time when folks "fall" off a climb they are really jumping off them at whatever their emotional limit was at that moment. I think the average solid climber only climbs at their true physical limit a few times in a lifetime. I think we are seeing that gap between physical and emotional limits closed more and more as the sport matures, but the flip side of that is I think we are seeing it from a declining percentage of the total climbing population as it grows larger and more risk averse every year.

Also, as we've somewhat discussed here before, what you are calling "risky" climbing is a very strange game. It is far less focused on actual climbing ability

I know your religion prohibits you from using hangdog tactics, Healyje, but have you ever tried to do a sport-style redpoint of a route harder than anything you have ever done before? The emotional aspect of the game is quite significant, and unlike runout slab climbing you can't just remind yourself you aren't really going to fall (because you are going to fall).

Also, as we've somewhat discussed here before, what you are calling "risky" climbing is a very strange game. It is far less focused on actual climbing ability, so really has little (or nothing) to do with the type of rock climbing that I like (bouldering, sport, etc), and is also way softer on the "risk" than real risk-based sports (like BASE). Of course, its practitioners both think they are good climbers, and very bold, when more objectively they are often neither. Quite a humorous historical curiousity....

:lol:

My point is that comparing climbers to each other has little meaning in terms of training techniques. What is meaningful is a specific climber's improvement over a period time using a certain technique compared to using a different technique.

In particular, the more advanced the climber, the more specific his training tends to be, to the point that the most advanced climbers do little off-the-rock (or out-of-the-rock-gym) training at all. In contrast, beginning to intermediate climbers seem obsessed with aparatus exercises, such as pull-ups and front levers. If such exercises are so effective, then it seems reasonable they would be used more often by advanced climbers, but we don't seem to observe this, as a rule.

Jay